[GOAL] FW: [SCHOLCOMM] On sponsorship, transparency, scholarly publishing, and open access

[David Prosser]

Please find below a response from Glenn where he kindly confirms that Elsevier/RELX is the single largest contributor of delegates to OSI.  Glenn thinks 7 out of almost 400, the list I’ve seen suggests 12.  But rather than quibble about figures we can agree that, for whatever reason, Elsevier clearly considers OSI a valuable forum to spend it’s lobbying effort - both in time and money.

Glenn also mentions the commitment of George Mason University and that reminded me of another interesting sponsorship ‘event' that Richard didn’t mention.  I’m sure that people will recall the recent thought piece on ‘Open-Access Mandates and the Seductively False Promise of “Free”' (https://cpip.gmu.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/31/2014/04/Viswanathan-Mossoff-Open-Access-Mandates-and-the-Seductively-False-Promise-of-Free.pdf) from the Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property at George Mason.  The argument was that government-mandated open access policies were wrong in principle and an infringement of publishers’ rights.  Through what I assume was an oversight the paper failed to mention that the Center is funded in part by the RELX Group. Of course, the Center is at pains to confirm that such sponsorship in no way influences what they publish as thought pieces or the stance they take.

David




On 20 Jul 2017, at 01:35, Glenn Hampson <ghampson at nationalscience.org<mailto:ghampson at nationalscience.org>> wrote:

Hi David,

Can you kindly post my reply to the GOAL list? Yes---contributions to OSI from legacy publishers increased year on year but so did our contributions from foundations. And in 2018, we hope that the contribution from UNESCO will be significantly larger than now. Indeed, our “fully-funded” budget for OSI means receiving significant funding from a very wide variety of sources (in which case publisher contributions will drop significantly as a percentage of the overall total). As a matter of principle, while we are very grateful for the interest and support from commercial publishers, we wouldn’t want their share of support to get much higher than now and we don’t think it will. The commercial publisher executives I’ve spoken with know this and agree with this as well---they also don’t want OSI to be seen as a tool of the publishers. Just as we don’t want the membership of OSI to become too homogenous, so too we don’t want the funding to become too lopsided from any one group. Again, though, the story here isn’t the increase---we’re a young and tiny group and we’re not talking about a pattern here or a lot of dollars---just a year on year change. I hope that if our funding from publishers drops next year as a percentage of the total you will also treat this as being newsworthy.

As for the 390-ish individual members of OSI, I’d need to do a hard count of bylines since we organize these folks by stakeholder and not institutional affiliations, but offhand I think you’re right---I think Elsevier probably has more individuals who are part of OSI (seven?) than any other institution (so we view these delegates as 7 of the 35 total commercial publisher reps). George Mason University has six (I think), George Washington University has five, the Smithsonian Institution has four OSI reps, Columbia University has three, etc.---point being that several of the 250 organizations represented in OSI have multiple delegates. But again, offhand, yes---I think Elsevier may be the winner. It’s important to note with this information, though, that having multiple delegates doesn’t translate into more voting power or more of a voice in conversations. As I mentioned previously, our commercial publisher colleagues have not been vocal participants in OSI listserv conversations to-date, nor have George Mason University staff and faculty said more than their fair share. Indeed, our top contributors to this list are widespread and include library leaders, open advocates, scholcomm experts (including Richard Poynder, who is a top contributor), and a wide variety of others, male and female, old (like me) and young, university-based and non-university, US and elsewhere.

I hope this helps. David---we would be honored to include you in this conversation. Just say the word.

Sincerely,

Glenn

Glenn Hampson
Executive Director
National Science Communication Institute (nSCI)
Program Director
Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI)
<image001.jpg>
2320 N 137th Street | Seattle, WA 98133
(206) 417-3607<tel:(206)%20417-3607> | ghampson at nationalscience.org<mailto:ghampson at nationalscience.org> | nationalscience.org<http://nationalscience.org/>



From: David Prosser [mailto:david.prosser at rluk.ac.uk]
Sent: Wednesday, July 19, 2017 3:27 PM
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) <goal at eprints.org<mailto:goal at eprints.org>>
Cc: Glenn Hampson <ghampson at nationalscience.org<mailto:ghampson at nationalscience.org>>
Subject: Re: [GOAL] FW: [SCHOLCOMM] On sponsorship, transparency, scholarly publishing, and open access

OSI is very transparent about it’s funding and that transparency shows clearly what Richard has stated - that the contribution from commercial, legacy publishers has increased and now makes up a larger proportion of the total than it did previously.

Can I also confirm the the organisation with the most representatives within OSI is Elsevier (including its parent company RELX)?

Thanks

David



On 19 Jul 2017, at 20:11, Richard Poynder <richard.poynder at cantab.net<mailto:richard.poynder at cantab.net>> wrote:

From: Glenn Hampson [mailto:ghampson at nationalscience.org]
Sent: 19 July 2017 18:31
To: 'Richard Poynder' <richard.poynder at btinternet.com<mailto:richard.poynder at btinternet.com>>; scholcomm-request at lists.ala.org<mailto:scholcomm-request at lists.ala.org>; 'The Open Scholarship Initiative' <osi2016-25 at googlegroups.com<mailto:osi2016-25 at googlegroups.com>>
Subject: RE: [SCHOLCOMM] On sponsorship, transparency, scholarly publishing, and open access

Hi Everyone,
I’d like to take this opportunity to invite everyone in the scholcomm community to nominate individuals (self-nominations are welcome) to participate in this year’s efforts of the Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI). Here’s what we’re about (from a draft version of our preamble, which is being finalized this summer):
The principles and practices of scholarly communication are critical to the advancement of research and research knowledge.  OSI’s mission is to build a robust framework for communication, coordination and cooperation among all nations and stakeholders in order to improve scholarly communication, beginning with scholarly publishing—to find common understanding and just, achievable, sustainable, inclusive solutions, and to work toward these solutions together in order to increase the amount of research information available to the world, as well as the number of people everywhere who can access this information. The guiding principles of OSI are to involve the entire stakeholder community in a collaborative effort; to value all stakeholder voices and perspectives; to thoughtfully consider the consequences of all approaches; to coordinate and collaborate on developing joint solutions and efforts; and to pursue and continue refining solutions over time to ensure their implementation, effectiveness, and success.
OSI includes high-level decision makers from all stakeholder groups and many different countries. We would particularly appreciate being able to add more active researchers and authors to OSI this year, more university provosts, and more industry leaders, policy makers, funder reps and journalists. Increasing the number of voices from outside the US and EU is also a goal. There are currently about 375 leaders on the OSI listserv, representing 18 different stakeholder groups, 23 countries and 250 institutions. Of these individuals, about 50 represent research universities (in an official capacity), 40 are library or library group leaders, 35 represent commercial publishers, 30 represent government policy organizations, 30 represent open knowledge groups and “born open” publishers, and 20 represent scholarly societies. Nominations will be considered by the advisory group. OSI tries to maintain a balance in terms of the number of representatives from each stakeholder group.
I would also like to take this opportunity to correct the statement made by Richard Poynder in his piece yesterday about the influence of funding from scholarly publishers, at least with regard to OSI. Much as I don’t want to take up my time and yours by arguing these points, and much as I value Richard’s scholarship and analysis, I do have a responsibility to OSI and its supporters and members to not allow misstatements like these to linger (even if no one ends up reading this email, I have a responsibility to correct the record). As a general point, it has certainly been well-documented that research funding can influence research outcomes. “Soft” sponsorships are a much murkier case, however. We’re talking here about everything from television commercials to billboards to the ads that pop up alongside New York Times articles. Sponsors make it possible for programs and events to happen---not just in scholcomm but in medicine, sports, tech, news, on university campuses and in public parks. Right or wrong, sponsorships are part of modern society and an important part at that. As far as OSI is concerned, we are grateful for the interest and support we’ve received from our sponsors to-date and we welcome support from all interested sources. Indeed, we would ideally like to see universities take over most of the funding responsibilities for this effort if only because scholcomm reform is such a university-centric set of issues (spread between 100 campuses, this wouldn’t amount to much at all), but until/unless this happens, UNESCO, foundations, publishers, and OSI members themselves will carry the load.
Here are the specific corrections to Richard’s article:

  1.  “Membership of OSI is made up primarily of legacy publishers and US librarians.” This is incorrect. As noted above, about 10% of OSI members are commercial publishing reps and another 10% are librarians. However, most OSI reps wear several hats, so research university reps are often library heads and scholarly society reps may come from their publishing division. This may be a source of Richard’s misinterpretation. Even counting this overlap, though, the totals are far from “primarily.”
  2.  “…as the funding provided for OSI by UNESCO has been falling, so the contributions of legacy publishers have been increasing.” OSI has an annual operating budget of only about US$150,000 at the moment. We’re not talking a lot of money here. And there have only been two years of funding, which is not enough to start drawing trendlines. In year one (for OSI2016), commercial publishers supplied $27,500 of funding for a program that cost $168,850. In year two they supplied $50,000 for a program that cost $134,300---more money for a cheaper program. In the same period, foundation support almost doubled from $25,000 to $45,000, UNESCO support fell by almost half (a temporary situation), participant registration fees were slashed from $58,000 to $13,500 and scholarship support grew from a few thousand dollars to over $20,000 this year. So what kind of story you want to write about these meager totals really depends on what kind of axe you’re looking to grind---UNESCO is down, foundations are up, etc. The bottom line is that we did more with less in 2017 and these budget numbers will change again next year when UNESCO will hopefully be able to contribute more. Also, we’ve never hidden these raw figures so there’s no need to interpret secondary source material. These numbers are in the OSI reports and website, and available on request:
OSI INCOME

OSI2016

OSI2017

UNESCO

$48,000

$25,000

Foundations

Doris Duke Charitable Foundation

$0

$25,000

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

$20,000

$20,000

Laura & John Arnold Foundation

$5,000

$0

Commercial publishers

Elsevier

$7,500

$20,000

Taylor & Francis (Informa)

$0

$5,000

Nature Publishing Group (Macmillan)

$5,000

$10,000

Wiley

$7,500

$10,000

Sage Publications

$5,000

$5,000

Copyright Clearance Center

$2,000

$0

ResearchMedia

$500

$0

Universities

PressForward Institute (via Sloan)

$5,500

$0

George Mason University

$4,500

$0

Participant fees (@ $500 ea)

$58,000

$13,500

Private donations

$350

$800

Total income

$168,850

$134,300


  1.  “the [OSI listserv] discussion frequently gets bogged down in bad-tempered, unproductive conversations (see here for instance). But since they hold the purse strings it is publishers who will likely determine the outcomes (as Prosser fears).” We haven’t surveyed OSI members about the list. Almost all of the feedback I receive is very positive but we do need to get a handle on what everyone thinks. What I can say is that there are 2,500 messages shared per year on this list and the vast majority of these are very thoughtful and informative. Also, we have heard from members who would like to see other ways to drive conversations off-list, and we’re looking into these solutions this year. It is true that there are occasions when some OSI members (including Richard) will occasionally protest the concept of OSI or including publishers in this conversation, and this results in a frustrating period of a few days when I need to remind folks that OSI is a diverse and inclusive group and that it’s important to treat each other with respect. But this is all part of the challenge of this diverse group. As far as determining outcomes, commercial publishers do very little speaking on the OSI list at the moment relative to much more vocal anti-publisher voices. They are not driving conversations on-list. As for off-list influence, there are no sponsorship quid pro quos from any OSI funders. Indeed, we are beholden to our foundation and UNESCO supporters to keep this effort open and balanced; our commercial publisher supporters have never requested anything (other than poster space). I assure you that there would never be a situation where we would accept any amount from any funder in exchange for twisting the truth---I don’t even know what that kind of scenario would look like Richard (“Hello, OSI? We’ll give you $100k if you promote Product X as the new solution to peer review?” Really? Can I keep $99k of that for my legal bills?)
  2.  “Sponsored conversations can also lead to censorship. When in 2016, for instance, someone criticised a publisher on the OSI mailing list the moderator promptly deleted his comments, inaccurately portraying them as a “personal dispute”. In fact, as an advisor to the criticised publisher later pointed out, the criticism was justified and appropriate.” Correct. If I recall correctly, I thought this conversation had to do with someone’s sour grapes about their publishing contract and was therefore inappropriate for the OSI listserv (or any listserv for that matter). I was wrong, I apologized to the group, and I corrected my mistake. Indeed, the ensuing conversation helped clarify that there would never be any censorship on the OSI list, so this wasn’t a negative outcome but a positive. Censorship comes about in many ways Richard---take intolerance or social media bubbles, for instance---as I’m sure you’ll agree. Having someone you disagree with in a group conversation doesn’t lead to censorship. Shouting down that person’s right to speak or claiming their perspective isn’t legitimate are, however, both very powerful forms of censorship. Indeed, I would argue that in this particular context, the fear of getting ridiculed on social media by people who are unwilling to see your point of view or even acknowledge your right to co-exist in the scholcomm marketplace is a much more corrosive, much more pervasive influence in the scholcomm conversation than the soft power of sponsorships by people and organizations who are willing and able to help promote this dialogue.
I think those are the main points. As always, if you have any questions you are welcome to email me any time.
Thank you and best regards,
Glenn

Glenn Hampson
Executive Director
National Science Communication Institute (nSCI)
Program Director
Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI)
<image001.jpg>
2320 N 137th Street | Seattle, WA 98133
(206) 417-3607<tel:(206)%20417-3607> | ghampson at nationalscience.org<mailto:ghampson at nationalscience.org> | nationalscience.org<http://nationalscience.org/>


From: scholcomm-request at lists.ala.org<mailto:scholcomm-request at lists.ala.org> [mailto:scholcomm-request at lists.ala.org] On Behalf Of "Richard Poynder" (via scholcomm Mailing List)
Sent: Tuesday, July 18, 2017 5:43 AM
To: scholcomm at lists.ala.org<mailto:scholcomm at lists.ala.org>
Subject: [SCHOLCOMM] On sponsorship, transparency, scholarly publishing, and open access

Sponsorship in the research and library communities is pervasive today, and scholarly publishers are some of the most generous providers of it. While the benefits of this sponsorship to the research community at large are debatable, publishers gain a great deal of soft power from dispensing money in this way. And they use this soft power to help them contain, control and shape the changes scholarly communication is undergoing, often in ways that meet their needs more than the needs of science and of scientists.

This sponsorship also often takes place without adequate transparency.

These are the kinds of issues explored in this (pdf) document http://bit.ly/2taOuoL, which includes some examples of publisher sponsorship, and the associated problems of non-transparency that often go with it. In particular, there is a detailed case study of a series of interviews conducted by Library Journal with leading OA advocates that was sponsored by Dove Medical Press.

Amongst those interviewed was the de facto leader of the OA movement Peter Suber. Suber gave three separate interviews to LJ, but not once was he informed when invited that the interviews were sponsored, or that they would be flanked with ads for Dove – even though he made it clear after the first interview that he was not happy to be associated with the publisher in this way.

http://bit.ly/2taOuoL

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